Technological improvements in the fields of cloud storage and mobile computing systems—together with a renewed emphasis on reducing paper consumption—have driven an increased interest in paperless systems by both consumers and businesses. Such paperless paradigms, which generally involve generating and storing digital versions of physical documents, provide numerous advantages, such as ubiquitous access to information, improved security (through strong encryption), automated data capture, reduced overhead, and document consolidation.
While paperless systems are advantageous in many respects, a number of significant challenges remain. For example, traditional scanning systems, such as those incorporated into conventional copy machines, tend to be bulky, expensive, and difficult to deploy. Most, in fact, require dedicated computer for set-up and operation. Furthermore, such systems do not provide a streamlined work-flow, and generally provide very few delivery options for scanned documents (i.e., typically only e-mail or a designated network folder). In addition, traditional scanning systems lack significant document editing functionality at the scanner interface.
Systems and methods are therefore needed that overcome these and other limitations of the prior art.